Other Sites Hope N.Y. Raid Will Energize Cause

Occupy Cal demonstrators at the University of California at Berkeley marched in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement on Tuesday.Credit
Jim Wilson/The New York Times

BOSTON — Hours after New York Police officers raidedOccupy Wall Street, the protest that spurred a nationwide movement of demonstrators camping in front of government buildings and financial institutions, protestors around the country said Tuesday that they hoped the breakup of the New York encampment would energize the movement but that it would otherwise have little impact on their own protests.

At several encampments, demonstrators who had watched the nighttime police raid in New York via live video streamed on the Internet and over Twitter and Facebook, said that while the Wall Street protest at Zuccotti Park had been their model and given them inspiration, they had no intention of halting their own demonstrations in response.

“I obviously think this is pretty devastating,” said Becca Chavez, 29, who has participated in Occupy Denver, which itself has had a series of run-ins with the police in recent weeks, leading to dozens of arrests. “It was hard to watch. I think because New York was a symbol for so much, if anything, this will get people involved. What they had set up in Zuccotti Park was a community. They really know what they were doing. I think this will really pull a lot of people in who would have not otherwise thought of getting involved.”

At Occupy Oakland, which has been raided twice by the police — once with officers using tear gas and projectiles against demonstrators — one protester, Alexandra Hernandez, 22, said Tuesday that while Occupy Wall Street had served as a beacon for other protests, its existence was no longer necessary for the other demonstrations to continue.

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University of California at Berkeley students took to the streets after a rally on Sproul Plaza on campus. Credit
Jim Wilson/The New York Times

“At the beginning, Zuccotti Park was essential for the movement,” she said. “When I saw the park for the first time, it made me think this was possible. It was physical evidence of a movement. To have a physical location was really important. It was different than anything that I’d seen in my lifetime.”

But she said that in light of the recent mass arrests of Occupy protesters across the country, it might be time for a shift in strategy. “The physical encampments have been an important symbol of this movement — it’s a taking back of public space,” she said. “There are a lot of people that still want to struggle to have encampments again. I don’t know if the encampments will continue.” Occupy demonstrations are intentionally leaderless, and protesters in different cities act independently of one another with each group making decisions about what to protest — though most of the camps appeared to have coalesced around opposition to growing disparities in individual wealth, the perceived greed of corporations and financial institutions, and high unemployment levels.

While many cities originally welcomed the protests after encampments began popping up about two months ago, the autonomy of the different sites has flummoxed law enforcement officers, many of whom have struggled with how to deal with them.

More recently, cities began enforcing prohibitions on camping and bans on tents.

And during the last several days, prior to the New York raid, authorities in Salt Lake City and Portland, Ore., as well as in Oakland and Denver, cracked down on the camps, making hundreds of arrests and flattening tents. Local officials said the camps had become public nuisances with sanitation, drug and other crime problems.

In at least two encampments around the country, people were discovered to have died inside their tents, and in Oakland, a fatal shooting near the encampment involving people who stayed there was among the reasons Mayor Jean Quan gave for ordering a second raid on the camp.

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Protesters from the Occupy Denver movement remained encamped at Civic Center Park near the State Capitol.Credit
Ed Andrieski/Associated Press

Mayor Quan said Tuesday in a radio interview that she was one of 18 officials on a conference call last Thursday organized by the United States Conference of Mayors to discuss local responses to Occupy encampments around the country. Mayor Sam Adams of Portland, Ore., said there had been two calls hosted by the organization “to share information about the occupying encampments around the country.” He described the calls as check-ins to share information and advice on how various cities were handling the demonstrations.

“We did not talk about what any mayor was considering in terms of any action or inaction,” Mr. Adams said.

A day after the Occupy Oakland camp was cleared out by the police, protesters there on Tuesday planned to march to join Occupy Cal demonstrators at the University of California at Berkeley. Protesters have said that they intend to repitch their tents on campus after an attempt to do so last week was thwarted by the police.

“The camps and the sites in other cities have become autonomous enough that it is not the kind of network where if one goes down, they all go down,” said Ms. Hernandez, an Oakland protester.

Officials at the University of California, Berkeley, said a man was shot by campus police on Tuesday when he pulled out a gun in a computer lab at the business school. A spokesman for the campus police said there was no reason to suspect the gunman was connected to the Occupy protests.

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Tents cover an Occupy D.C. encampment at Freedom Plaza in Washington. Protesters around the country have said that the removal of demonstrators from Manhattan's Zuccotti Park will not deter their movement.Credit
Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency

The raids, and cold, wet weather in some places, have significantly reduced the number of protesters in some cities.

On Tuesday in Denver for instance, there were only about a dozen people at a park across from the state capitol building, down substantially from the past six weeks, during which the police made approximately 84 arrests of people who had established an encampment there. In Boston, protesters Tuesday placed a large banner at the entrance to their camp in Dewey Square that read, “At 2 a.m. on Nov. 15 without warning NYPD raided OWS.”

“Last night the air was just electric with anxiety,” said John Ford, who runs the library at the encampment of about 150 tents, which is across the street from the Federal Reserve Bank. “A lot of people were convinced it was happening here.”

Demonstrators at Occupy Boston, one of the larger encampments in the country, with about 140 tents on Tuesday, said they had been warily watching the raids elsewhere. “I went home and got a helmet, just in case, after I heard about what happened in Oakland,” Mr. Ford said. He said he also had a plan to pack up the library, which now holds more than 1,000 books. “If they gave us three hours’ notice, I could get out of here,” he said. On Tuesday, the National Lawyers Guild, the American Civil Liberties Union and lawyers representing the Occupy Boston movement asked a Superior Court judge for an injunction barring the City of Boston and the police from removing protestors from the encampment.

In Chicago, there were only about half a dozen protesters standing amid office workers early Tuesday on a sidewalk across LaSalle Street from the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Chicago.

Video

Timescast | Occupy Oakland Raids

Hundreds of police officers raid the Occupy Oakland camp, and a police officer accused in a viral video of infiltrating Occupy Oakland speaks out in support of the movement.

Latron Price, 37, an organizer of Occupy Atlanta, said Tuesday he believed the raid on Occupy Wall Street was a sign that the protests had struck a nerve.

“To see that happen in New York shows we’re on the right track,” he said. “These arrests will only strengthen the protests elsewhere.”

While the number of protesters around the country have fallen, they appear to have grown in Los Angeles, where people are camped on the lawn of City Hall. Some have built plywood structures decorated with anti-Federal Reserve murals. On news of the New York raid, about 100 held a march accompanied by the police, said Sergeant Mitzi Fierro of the Los Angeles police.

Sergeant Fierro said, however, that while the protesters would be allowed to stay for the time being, some kind of change would need to happen soon.

“At some point, we’re going to have to address that they’re camped out on the City Hall lawn,” she said. “They’ve destroyed the lawn. They’re becoming detrimental to the trees, and it’s also become a health issue. At some point, hopefully very shortly, there has to be some kind of cleanup or movement to address those issues.”